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  THE WAR OF THE FLOWERS

  Tad Williams

  DAW Books, Inc. Donald A. Wollheim, Founder

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Elizabeth R. Wollheim Sheila E. Gilbert Publishers

  www.dawbooks.com in cooperation with SEATTLE BOOK COMPANY www.seattlebook.com Produced by

  RosettaMachine

  www.rosettamachine.com

  Copyright © 2003 by Tad Williams.

  All Rights Reserved. Jacket art by Michael Whelan.

  For color prints of Michael Whelan's paintings, please contact: Glass Onion Graphics, P.O. Box 88

  Brookfield, CT 06804

  www.michaelwhelan.com

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1225.

  DAW Books is distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Microsoft LIT edition ISBN: 0-7420-9316-6 Adobe PDF edition ISBN: 0-7420-9318-2 Palm PDB edition ISBN: 0-7420-9319-0 MobiPocket edition ISBN: 0-7420-9317-4

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  SEATTLE BOOK COMPANY

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  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  ii Electronic format made available by arrangement with

  DAW Books, Inc. www.dawbooks.com Elizabeth R. Wollheim Sheila E. Gilbert Publishers

  Palm Digital Media www.palm.com/ebooks iii

  DAW BOOKS PRESENTS THE FINEST IN IMAGINATIVE FICTION BY Tad Williams

  Tailchaser's Song

  The War of the Flowers

  Shadowmarch* MEMORY, SORROW, AND THORN The Dragonbone Chair

  Stone of Farewell

  To Green Angel Tower

  OTHERLAND

  City of Golden Shadow

  River of Blue Fire

  Mountain of Black Glass

  Sea of Silver Light

  *coming soon from DAW Books This book is dedicated with great love to my wife, Deborah Beale, who makes my life worth living in more ways than I can count, let alone list here.

  A good marriage and a loving family may not be the easiest things in the world to create, but I find it hard to believe there is anything more worth the effort. It is a Great Adventure, and I share mine with a wonderful woman.

  Deb, you are my personal fairy-tale ending. v This book didn't have quite as many midwives as some of my others, but it still wouldn't have made it into the world without a lot of help.

  I have again received support and useful feedback in too many ways to list from my wonderful agent Matt Bialer and my British editor Tim Holman, and my German editor Ulrike Killler. My brilliant wife Deborah Beale as always provided words of wisdom at many stages, both as a reader full of useful comments and because of her literary and publishing acumen. My thanks to all of them — I'm a very lucky writer. And of course, profound gratitude to my most excellent American publishers (and primary editors of this book) Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert, along with all the folks at DAW Books, for helping me to see another wild idea from conception to its emergence into the world, and for their constant exercise of creative patience. I couldn't do it without them.

  Blessings on you all.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Readers may notice a certain uncomfortable resonance in parts of this book to events around the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., of September 11, 2001. The part of the story that most closely parallels things that happened on that horrible day was actually part of the planned book since the beginning — while preparing to write this note I found it mentioned prominently in an outline written in January of 2000.

  I have modified those sections slightly so that they echo the real events a little less closely, but it was too central an event in the story to take out entirely. I hope anyone disturbed by the similarity will accept my apology for discomfort caused, and understand that this was a case of leaving in something already planned and important to the story rather than adding something after the fact to try to gain some cheap thrills out of a tragedy that was international in scope but also personal for very many people.

  vii

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part One GOODNIGHT NOBODY

  1 Clouds

  2 The Silent Primrose Maiden

  3 Descent

  4 The Hungry Thing

  5 Book

  6 A Corruption of Moonlight

  7 Woods

  8 Runaway Capacitor

  9 Visitors

  Part Two LAST EXIT TO FAIRYLAND

  10 Larkspur's Land

  11 A Disturbance in The Forcing Shed

  12 The Hollyhock Chest

  13 A Change in the Weather

  14 Penumbra Station

  15 The Plains of Great Rowan

  16 Poppy

  17 The Hothouse

  18 Sidewalks of New Erewhon

  19 A Holiday Visit

  20 Among the Creepers

  21 In Thornapple House

  22 Status Quo Ante

  23 The Shadow on the Tower

  viii

  Part Three FLOWER WAR

  24 The Bus Stop on Pentacle Street

  25 A Million Sparks

  26 Losing a Friend

  27 Button's Bridge

  28 Goblin Jazz Bandwagon

  29 The Hole in the Story

  30 Family Matters

  31 In the Bloom Years

  32 Trendy Fungus

  33 The Last Breath They Took

  Part Four THE LOST CHILD

  34 Interlude with Van Gogh Stars

  35 A Sort of Reunion

  36 Changelings

  37 The Ebony Box

  38 The Broken Stick

  39 Stepchild

  40 Strawflower Square

  41 The Cathedral

  Part Five FAIRYTALE ENDING

  42 Farewell Feast

  43 The Limits of Magic

  Index of People, Places, and Things

  ix

  PROLOGUE

  A single flower, a hellebore, stood in a vase of volcanic glass in the middle of the huge desk, glowing almost radioactively white in the pool of a small, artful spotlight. In other great houses the image of such a deceptively fragile-looking bloom would have been embroidered on a banner covering most of the wall behind the seat of power, but there was no need for such things here. No one could reach the innermost chambers of this monstrous bone-colored building and not know where they were and who ruled in this place.

  In the mortal world the hellebore is sometimes called the Christmas Rose because of an old tale that says it sprouted where a little girl who had no gift for the Christ Child wept into the snow outside the stable in Bethlehem. Both snow and the flower itself were unlikely to have been found in the Holy Land in those days, but that has never hurt the story's popularity.

  In Greece of the old myths, Melampus of Pylos used hellebore to save the daughters of the king of Argos from a Dionysian madness that had set them running naked through the city, weeping and screaming and laughing.

  There are many stories about hellebore. Most of them have tears in them. The Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles was no stranger to silence — in fact, he swam in it like a fish. He stared at the spotlit flower, letting his thoughts wander down some of the darker tracks of h
is labyrinthine mind, and waited, patient as stone, for the figure behind the desk to speak. The pause was a long one.

  The person on the other side of the desk, who had apparently been pursuing some internal quarry of his own, stirred at last. Slowly, almost lazily, he extended an arm to touch the flower on his desk. His spidersilk suit whispered so faintly only a bat or the creature sitting across from him could hear. His long finger, only a little less white than the flower, touched a petal and made it quiver.

  There were no windows here in the heart of the building, but the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles knew that it was raining hard outside, the drops spattering and hissing on the pavement, coach tires spitting. Here the air was as still as if he and his host sat inside a velvet-lined jewel casket.

  The shape in the beautiful, shimmering blue-black suit gently prodded the flower again. "War is coming," he said at last. His voice was deep and musical. Mortal women who had only heard him speak, waking to discover him warm and invisible in their rooms in the middle of the night, had fallen so deeply in love with that voice that they had foresworn all human suitors, giving up the chance of sunlit happiness forever in the futile hope he would return to them, would let them live again that one delirious midnight hour.

  "War is coming," agreed the Remover.

  "The child of whom we spoke before. It must not live."

  A long breath — was it a sigh? "It will not."

  "You will receive the usual fee." The Remover nodded, distracted by his own thoughts. He had very little fear that anyone, even this most powerful personage, would neglect to pay him. With war coming they would need him again. He was the specialist of specialists, totally discreet and terrifyingly effective. He also made a very bad enemy.

  "Now?" he asked. "As soon as you can. If you wait too long, someone might notice. Also we don't want the risk. The Clover Effect is still not perfectly understood. You might not get a second chance."

  The Remover stood. "I have never yet needed such a thing." He was gone from the inner room so quickly he might have been a shadow flitting across the dark walls. The master of the House of Hellebore could see much that others could not, but even he had trouble marking the exact progress of the Remover's self-deletion.

  It would not be good to have to guard against that one , he thought to himself. He must be kept sweet, or he must become ashes in the Well of Forgetting. Either way, he must never again work for one of the other houses. The master of the house stroked the pale flower on his desk again, considering.

  Another curiosity of the hellebore is that its bloom can be frozen solid in the deepest winter snows, but when the ice melts away, dripping from the petals like tears, the flower beneath is still alive, still supple. Hellebore is strong and patient.

  The tall, lean figure in the spidersilk suit pressed a button on the side of his desk and spoke into the air. The winds of Faerie carried his words to all those who needed to hear them, throughout the great city and all across the troubled land, summoning his allies and tributaries to the first council of the next war of the Flowers.

  Part One GOODNIGHT NOBODY

  1 CLOUDS

  Theo felt a small flutter of guilt as he turned the cell phone back on, especially when he noticed he'd left it off for more than two hours, and was relieved to see that there were no messages. He'd only meant to flick it off for a few minutes, just to make sure there were no interruptions while they were tuning — the young guys, especially Kris, the guitarist, got really pissy about that — but things had started happening and he'd forgotten.

  Johnny stepped over the guitar cases spread across the living room rug like discarded cocoons and slid open the door to join him outside. The fog had come down the hill while they had been practicing; the fenced patio seemed an island in a cold, misty sea.

  Jesus, San Francisco in March. He should have brought his jacket out. Might as well be in Minnesota. "Hey," he asked Johnny, "got a smoke?" The drummer made a face and patted his shirt pocket, then his pants pockets. He was small but he had long, strong arms. With his paunch and his shaggy but balding head, the chest hair climbing out of his T-shirt collars, he always made Theo think of the soulful chimpanzees in that Englishwoman's documentaries.

  When Johnny found the pack at last, he shook out one for Theo, then one for himself and lit it. "Man, you never have your own."

  "Never buy any. I only smoke when I'm playing." Johnny shook his head. "That's so typical, Vilmos — you always get the easy road. I'm an addict, you only smoke when you want to — like, when you're around me. I'll probably be the one who gets cancer, too."

  "Probably." Theo considered calling home, but he was going to be leaving in a few minutes anyway. Still, Cat was very deep into I'm-pregnant-andI-want-to-know-where-you-are mode . . . He felt another ripple of guilt and couldn't decide what to do. He stared at the phone, as perplexed as if it were an artifact of a vanished civilization.

  "Your old lady leave a message?" Johnny was the only one in the band who was Theo's age but he talked like he was even older, unashamedly using words like "chicks" and "hip." Theo had actually heard him say "out of sight" once, but he had sworn later he was being ironic. Johnny was also the only one who'd even understand something as archaic as phoning home. Kris and Dano and Morgan were in that early-twenties stage where they just paged their girlfriends to announce when they were dropping by after practice to have sex.

  "Nah. I gotta get going, anyway." Johnny flipped his cigarette over the fence and out into the street, a tiny shooting star. "Just listen to the playback on 'Feast,' first. You don't want Kris's asshole to get any more puckered than it already is, do you?" He smiled deep in his beard and started peeling off the athletic tape he wrapped around his knuckles before playing because he bashed them against the rims so hard. Theo thought that he'd rather have scars than the pink, hairless patches that striped Johnny's hairy hands, but Johnny was a seemingly permanently single guy who hadn't had a date in months, so he didn't worry much about things like that.

  Theo did. He was seriously considering whether it was time to cut his moderately long brown hair. It was bad enough to have turned thirty and still be singing in garage bands without looking like an aging stoner, too.

  ————— As it turned out, Theo spent at least another half an hour listening to the demo tracks they had recorded for "Feast of Fools," a sort of high-Goth processional that Kris had written, and over which the guitarist fussed like a neurotic chef preparing for an important dinner party. He had more than a few irritating things to say about Theo's vocal, wanting more rasp in it, more of an air of menace, the kind of melodrama that Theo didn't much like.

  On their last listen, as Kris bobbed his close-cropped head to his own music, his expression oddly combining pleasure and pain, Theo had a sudden flash of insight: He's going to want to do the vocal on this himself — that's where this is going. And even though I'm a hundred times better, eventually he's going to get his confidence and want to do all the lead vocals himself. And that'll be it for me with this band.

  He wasn't certain how he felt about that. On the one hand, much as he admired the young guys' playing and Kris Rolle's musical ideas, it wasn't anything like his ideal band. For a start, he hated the name — The Mighty Clouds of Angst. It was clumsy. Worse, it was a joke name, playing off a famous gospel group, The Mighty Clouds of Joy. Theo believed firmly that joke names equaled joke bands, the Beatles notwithstanding. Plus, it just irritated him. Kris, Morgan, and Dano weren't even old enough to remember The Mighty Clouds of Joy, so why pick that as a name to parody? It smacked a little of white suburban boys making fun of earnest, religious black people, and that made Theo uncomfortable. But if he ever mentioned it, he knew they'd just show him that fishlike stare they had perfected, the all-purpose defense against hopelessly uncool parents and teachers, and he would feel even older than he did.

  So when did I wind up on the wrong side of that particular line? He eased on his ancient leather jacket and bummed another smoke off
John for the road — or for home, rather, since it was pretty hard to smoke while wearing a motorcycle helmet. He looked around, feeling like he was leaving something behind. Lead singers didn't carry much in the way of equipment. The mikes and PA belonged to Morgan and Kris. Theo could walk away from the Clouds as easily as he was strolling out the door tonight. If he was good at anything, it was leaving when things got too weird.

  If he did get forced out, would Johnny quit too? Theo wasn't sure how he felt about that. This was the third band he'd played in with Johnny Battistini, following the obligatory should-have-made-it-big disaster in which they'd met and the horrible cover band in which they'd marked time until hooking up with Kris and company. Theo wouldn't mind the downtime of looking for another gig, and God knew Catherine would be happy to have him home some nights, especially with the baby coming, but ol' Johnny B. didn't have a lot else going on in his life. Besides his record store job and the Clouds, in fact, John was pretty much the kind of guy advertisers made fun of but who kept their clients in business — an amiable lump who lived on take-out food, rented porn movies in bunches, and watched wrestling by himself.

  Kris looked up from yet another playing of "Feast of Fools" as Theo reached the door. "You going?" He sounded irritated. Kris had gray eyes like a sky before a storm, the kind of eyes in which teenage girls probably saw things that weren't really there at all.

  No, Theo wanted to say. No, I'm going to hang around here and stay up all night smoking dope and marveling at my own brilliance, just like you guys, because I've got nothing better to do and nobody on my ass about when I come home.

  "Can't stay," he said instead. "I've got a pregnant girlfriend, remember?" And for a self-righteous moment he almost forgot he had left the phone off for two hours.

  Kris rolled his eyes, dismissing the entire unimaginably boring subject, then punched the buttons on the DAT deck with his long fingers, rewinding the tape to listen to his feedback-heavy solo again. Morgan and Dano bobbed their heads once each in Theo's direction, which he assumed was to save the energy of waving. John smiled at him, sharing the joke, although unlike Theo he was going to stay and hang out with these kids a decade younger than himself, sharing bong hits and loose talk about a hypothetical first album until one or two in the morning. "Stay loose, Thee," he called.